R_KKK — Saint Noizes

Here’s a very diy release from (K)Anál Records, a CDR with a colour copied (or printed) inlay. The disc has six tracks, all pushing synth/electronics-driven harsh noise. Each of the tracks is around ten minutes in length, and all of them explore the (apparently) same set-up and sounds.

To be honest, the album doesn’t really change much across the tracks; the first piece, ’Noiz For Girls’, is a fair indication of the rest of Saint Noizes: lots of raw synthy noise, stereo-spirit with filtering and swashing, and delay stutters and short drones. The overall sound feels a little ‘digital’ and computer-like, despite the inlay featuring a photo of some boutique-type synth devices connected to a mixer, including a synth that I recognise but can’t name for the life of me. Along the way this barrage creates short sections of white noise, bitcrushed textures, and some crunchy noise textures - and the sections are indeed very short: it’s not cut-up noise but it is constantly moving and shifting. And this leads into my feeling regarding the whole album: it has numerous wonderful moments of synth churn or texture, and moments where things suddenly coalesce into a meaningful hit, but generally these moments are scattered and isolated and not joined together by material that would make the whole thing enthralling: the peaks are high but the troughs are a little humdrum. So, for example, ‘Noiz For Boyz’ has some effective helicopter type noises and strong bass moments, ‘Noizdra Z Pouzdra’ has some solid chewy synth sounds and high pitched piercing treble, and ‘Noize Pre-Pauze’ has a good section around the seven/eight minute mark where things do come together briefly, but generally the tracks as a whole batter away in a middle ground where it’s not an overwhelming noise assault, but nor are the sounds presented in such a way that they can enjoyed for their textures, for example. ‘Noiz For Hmyz’ does perhaps loiter on sounds a little longer, but as a rule if there are exquisite sounds/tones/timbres (and there are), they’re gone in seconds; and in a way I like that, there’s an admirable bloodymindedness to that, but I’d rather listen to elongated version of those sounds, or a more hyper-kinetic attack from the album. I do feel that if you stripped away the foregrounded kinetic aspects, the textures created in their wake in the background would be more fun to listen to.

If you like the kind of raw electronic sounds that you get from homemade and boutique synths, there will be something here for you; at the same time - as someone who does love those sounds - R_KKK is constantly twiddling and twirling, so sounds fly by at a blistering pace and can’t really be appreciated on a timbral level. In terms of structure and form, there’s very little sense of dynamics, which diminishes the power of the pieces for me, and the tracks thus hover awkwardly between synth-twiddling and building into some kind of critical mass of noise.